The app had six ways to turn a name into avatar initials, and none of
them was the webmail's. The webmail's Avatar skips punctuation and
symbols in front of each name part ("Sofia" Russo is SR, not "S), takes
two letters of a single name and the first letter of the address
without one. Senders, accounts (sidebar and sign-in), contacts, compose
suggestions and the home-screen widgets all use that now.
Sender avatars ignored address-book photos, so a contact whose photo
shows in Contacts still got initials or a favicon in the mail list,
the viewer and the thread cards. Like the webmail's `Avatar`, the
contact photo now wins over the favicon and the initials; `disableImages`
(Junk) still shows initials only.
The lookup goes through a lowercased email -> photo index that is built
once per contacts array, and each avatar selects just its own photo
string, so a list of avatars neither rescans the address book per row
nor re-renders when an unrelated contact changes. Stalwart returns
photos as inline data URIs, which the index normalizes the same way
Contacts does, so no authenticated download is involved.
Linus Rath
